coney island's storied past

john parascandola and louis parascandola

Coney Island as inspiration

Coney Island, Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York has long been a rich source of inspiration that is open to individual analyses, lending itself to a variety of interpretations, making it many things to many people. It presents a kaleidoscopic, ever changing landscape, prompting Henry Miller and later Lawrence Ferlinghetti to use it metaphorically in the phrase “A Coney Island of the Mind.” For some, it is the symbol of the best of America’s democratic nature, welcoming all regardless of race, social class, gender, or ethnicity while for others it has been a site of blighted dreams, representing the excesses of capitalism, and of urban decay. Sometimes, these views might shift depending on the period in Coney’s history, whether it was a quiet bathing resort, a great amusement park, a nickel empire or a place in various stages of decline. On occasion, these conflicting views may even exist simultaneously. (To read about Coney Island's history, click here)

Because of these seemingly limitless perspectives, Coney has been depicted in a multiplicity of ways by a variety of authors from many eras. A stunning gallery of some of the world’s finest authors, including Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Jose Marti, Maxim Gorky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Joseph Heller have been inspired by Coney. Each wrote of Coney from their own unique vantage point, offering a panoply of perspectives of this iconic place.

Even before Coney become world-renowned as an amusement area, it was seen as a respite from the crowded city. Its main appeal for Walt Whitman, however, does not seem to be as a place for refuge. Writing in the Brooklyn Eagle in1847 about a clambake there, Whitman is impressed by the inclusiveness of the outing, befitting America’s greatest poet of democracy. He writes: “The members of the party were numerous and various – embracing all the professions, and nearly all the trades, besides sundry aldermen, and other officials.” No one is forgotten, even the “artisans and workingmen…the ladies [and] the Brooklyn press.” This theme of the democratic nature of Coney, where the working class could mingle with the middle and upper classes, reappeared in literature numerous times. However, for much of Coney’s history minorities, such as African-Americans, were excluded from many facilities.

Writing in 1894, by which time Coney was well established as an amusement resort, Stephen Crane presented a more gloomy picture of Coney at the end of a summer season in “Coney Island’s Failing Days.” The narrator, obviously Crane, is speaking to a stranger who feels “sad” over the “mammoth empty buildings” that contrast with the optimism of those who built them. The stranger’s disappointment is linked to the narrator’s own disillusionment over the failure of his own “youthful dreams.” This in turn is connected with the despair that the masses felt after leaving Coney on a Sunday excursion and having to go back to “that inevitable, overhanging, devastating Monday.” Rather than seeing Coney as a temporary respite from the drudgery of work, a place of fantasy and escape, for Crane it was a cruel reminder of the temporality of our dreams, of the fragility of our hopes and expectations.

"The Vomiting Multitudes"

Samantha at Coney Island, Marietta Holley

By the end of the nineteenth century, Coney’s fame had spread internationally. As a result, it drew many well-known foreign visitors, including Maxim Gorky, Jose Martí, and Federico Garcia Lorca. For them, Coney became almost a microcosm of America. To Gorky, as expressed in “Boredom” (1907), the “city of fire” had enthralled the masses with its garish delight, its “ugly variety.” For the working class who made up the bulk of its clientele, it ensnared them in “a brilliant cobweb of translucent buildings.” In reality, Coney epitomized their boring existence, the hypocrisy of their lives, “the insatiable power of their greed.” In “Coney Island” (1883), Martí also looked at Coney as a symbol of American capitalism, a product of a nation dominated by the “eagerness to possess wealth.” Coney, frequented by so many of those on the bottom of the social ladder, served, in fact, as an “immense valve of pleasure,” allowing a necessary outlet for the masses. A later visitor, Garcia Lorca, also provided a nightmarish vision of Coney as a symbol of America at the beginning of the Great Depression of 1929 in “Landscape of the Vomiting Multitudes” (from A Poet in New York, 1940). In his vision, Coney’s, and America’s, promise of hope had faded. Fittingly set at dusk and written at the end of the year, the poem is dominated by images of illness, death, and decay while the narrator is left helpless, “armless, adrift / in the vomiting multitudes.”Working-class women were among the groups using Coney as an outlet from their often dreary lives. Such women were often left with few places to socialize and, since most of them lived with their families or with roommates in crowded conditions, with little opportunity to entertain visitors, they often went to Coney to meet men. Once there, they would often rely, as historian Kathy Peiss says in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986), “on the system of treating [whereby] women could enjoy a day at Coney’s resorts with their only expense being transportation.” This is exactly what Florence, in O. Henry’s short story “Brickdust Row” (1907) does. Meeting a wealthy real estate owner, Blinker, Florence spends a day at Coney at his expense. In exchange, Blinker has his notion of the working class transformed: “He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looks clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists.” The mixing of people from a variety of social classes at Coney, who might otherwise never come into contact with one another, thus allows for brief moments of enlightenment. Another example of a working-class woman who meets a man at Coney Island is featured in the novel Dreamland, discussed below.

Marietta Holley, a popular humorist often compared to Mark Twain in the late 19th and early 20th century, also wrote of women at Coney in Samantha at Coney Island and Other Islands (1911). However, her heroine, Samantha Allen, is not single. Samantha, a common-sensical small-town Midwest woman, searches for her dim-witted husband Josiah, who has absconded to Coney with a friend. Samantha dutifully decides she must save him from the perceived dangers of Coney: “Spozein’ the elephants should tread on him? Or the boyconstructors or tigers git after him? Or he should go to the moon and git lost there and be obliged to stay?” The latter reference is to the popular ride “A Trip to the Moon.” Resourceful Samantha must brave the wilds of Coney to bring her mate back safely. Kevin Baker’s novel Dreamland (1999) presents a vivid picture of Coney Island in the early twentieth century, when it boasted of three great amusement parks, Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland. Although he gives readers a sense of the magic and excitement of Coney at the time, Baker does not romanticize its history. Dreamland is a sprawling work that weaves together both fact and fiction (Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are among the cast of characters) in reflecting Coney during its glory years. The book, loaded with Yiddish phrases and gangland slang, describes Coney as both a brutally violent place as well as a place of solace for those who could not find comfort (including freaks, criminals, and poor women) in the outside world. There is a sense that Coney is a community, a sometimes magical place where seeming misfits can come and establish a home, albeit a troubled one. Only Coney will allow such people to reside within its limits. Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo (2004), set between the two World Wars, also serves as a place of refuge for another “misfit,” the tattoo artist Cy Parks, in exile from England. While at Coney, he is befriended by the inhabitants of the freak shows, especially Grace, who allows him to use her body as his canvas.

A CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

Coney Island in the 1930s

Although Coney is generally thought of as an amusement area, it was also home to many people. Joseph Heller’s autobiography Now and Then (1998) and Isaac B. Singer’s short story “A Day in Coney Island” (1938) both give us insider perspectives to Coney Island in the 1930s, particularly through a Jewish lens. Coney at this time, as the rest of America, was in a period of decline which is reflected in both Heller’s and Singer’s works. But despite the financial hardships, a sense of vitality dominates these works. Heller, who was born in Coney Island, recalls his youth in vivid detail, speaking of what it was like to grow up not just in an amusement area, but in an actual neighborhood. He remarks that people were always stunned to realize that he grew up in Coney, “that families lived there, and still do, and that children were brought up there, and still are.” To him, Coney was simply home. Singer’s autobiographical story provides an immigrant’s take on life in Sea Gate, a somewhat exclusive area at the time, though the writer was by no means wealthy, away from the commercial strip of Coney. He writes of his financial and cultural struggles in adjusting to America. What predominates in the story, though, is the support and strong sense of community Singer felt in the émigré Jewish area. It was this support that enabled Singer to survive tough times and to spur his initial success as a writer.

Although most people believe the phrase “a Coney Island of the Mind” was coined by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, it actually comes from Henry Miller’s book Black Spring (1936). The work is not truly a novel, but a collection of vignettes, essays, sketches and prose poems. It is impressionistic and grotesque, depicting a nightmarish world. Miller does not explicitly discuss Coney Island in this work, but rather uses it as a metaphor (hence a “Coney Island of the Mind”) for the "sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard" landscape of a dream in which “Everything is a lie, a fake.” Ferlinghtetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) is one of the best-known volumes of American poetry. Though Coney Island is never actually referred to in Ferlinghetti’s collection, its spirit of freedom and imagination, unlike in Miller’s work, is omnipresent. Its colorful world is at odds with what Ferlinghetti felt was the conservatism of the McCarthy era. Poem Number 20, for example, captures this sense of fantasy when the narrator remembers his childhood where “The pennycandystore beyond the El is where I first fell in love with unreality.”

Coney Island began to decline after World War II, and Sol Yurick’s The Warriors (1965), more famous as a movie than a novel, helped perpetuate the predominant view of Coney in the 1960s: a gang-filled, crime-ridden wasteland. In actuality, the plot comes not from the blight of Coney Island but from classical antiquity, the Persian expedition recorded in Xenophon’s Anabasis. As Yurick himself has said, gangs are “a universal phenomenon,” and The Warriors is simply his updating of an ancient story” Yet that he chose Coney as the site for this apocalyptic vision (made even more terrifying in the film) is telling. However, for the teenage Warriors, Coney is not a violent place. Rather, it is the one place of safety in an otherwise dangerous world. And the gang, instead of being made villains, are heroes in their quest to return to their home base, with its “comforting familiarity” by the ocean.

CREATING OUR OWN CONEY ISLAND

Coney Island Postcard, Public Domain

Coney, of course, is a source of inspiration for a new generation of writers as well. They continue to interpret according to their own perspective. The sketch “Coney Island” from Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York (2003) is an impressionistic, almost poetic ode to Coney. It is a place where thousands of New Yorkers are thrown together, and the city and nature come into a sometimes contentious contact with one another. Maureen McHugh’s “A Coney Island of the Mind” (1993) fittingly provides an imagined glimpse of Coney’s future. Here, a virtual Coney is constructed which one can visit on-line from anywhere. It is possible to invent one’s own persona and one’s own Coney landscape. It is the ultimate opportunity to create our own Coney Island.

As the numerous writers cited have demonstrated, along with many other authors, Coney Island has long been a fecund source to kindle the imagination. Its richness has made it iconic, whether in good or bad times and throughout its various incarnations. There is no doubt that this magic place will, no matter what its form, continue to stir the creative mind for many years to come.

Louis J. Parascandola received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of City University of New York . He has taught at various institutions and is currently Professor of English at Long Island University. John Parascandola received his Ph.D. in history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he taught for fourteen years. After retiring from a career of more than twenty years as a historian for the Federal government, he teaches part-time at the University of Maryland College Park. This article is adapted from the anthology A Coney Island Reader: “Through Dizzy Gates of Illusion," edited by the authors and to be published by Columbia University Press in late 2014 (available for advance order from the publisher and on Amazon.com).